I was quite pleased to see Buck stay awake for the entire game on Monday in Washington, DC.

I wasn’t all that thrilled on Sunday in Toronto when he fell asleep in the bottom of the 9th inning and cost the Orioles a game by snoozing through another Jim Johnson meltdown.

Talk about a wasted weekend.

There is a HUGE difference between winning three of four games and splitting a 4-game series.

When you win two and lose two, you might as well have not played at all.

And the Birds were poised to win three of four right up until Buck had to prove to everyone that he’s right about Jim Johnson.

I think Buck is a helluva manager. One of the best in the American League. But, this JJ-struggling-beyond-imagination thing is going to spiral out of control if Showalter doesn’t get it figured out soon enough.

My guess? If Johnson blows one of these next three games against the Nationals, the right hander will come up with one of those overnight injuries, a la Pedro Strop’s “lower back strain”, head to the DL, and then enjoy a brief minor league stint to get his mechanics tweaked.

JJ’s unreliability can’t continue if the Orioles want to be alive come September.

Buck should know that.

If he doesn’t, he better figure it out quickly.

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Kudos to the Towson University baseball team for their CAA title this past weekend. Like the football team a couple of years ago and the men’s basketball team last year, the baseball program came out of nowhere to rise to the top of the Colonial Athletic Association. Good for them.

It’s a shame only family and friends bothered to go to the stadium to watch them play this season. I stopped by a Wednesday home game in April and there were about 75 people there — on a nice day, weather wise. A few hundred people per-game would go a long way to prove that the community in general cares about Towson baseball. Maybe winning will help boost the crowds.

The program teetering on the brink of extinction didn’t get people to attend the games – for free – and show their support.

Let’s hope they figure out how to get back on track, because Towson University needs baseball.

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Did Joe Linta really say all of that stupid stuff over the weekend about the Joe Flacco negotiations?

If so, he gets Dummy-of-the-Month for May 2013.

Remember back in February and March when I suggested that Linta was more interested in making the Flacco deal for his OWN benefit than for his client’s?

I brought that subject up to some national “experts” and they all poo-poo’d my observation, saying, effectively, Linta was just doing his job and wasn’t a spotlight grabber.

I disagreed then and now, for sure, I think I was right when I said that it seemed to me that Linta was looking to get his name in the media as much or more than Flacco.

I don’t know why he would have spouted off like that over the weekend. It served ZERO purpose at all to laugh out loud at Ozzie and the Ravens like that.

Here’s another thing I suspect: Flacco isn’t happy with his agent right about now.

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Just about every single time I watched Elena Delle Donne play for Delaware, I made the same comment: “It sure would be nice to see her get the bit between her teeth just once…to see how good she can really be.”

I saw Delle Donne play about ten times in her college career, either the Lady Blue Hens visited Towson or at her home venue in Newark, Delaware, and on nearly every occasion it was a walk-in-the-park for her. She’d score 21 points, Delaware would win by whatever they wanted to and it always left me wondering what would happen if the young lady ever faced a real challenge on the court.

Well, we got a little glimpse of how good Delle Donne can be in her WNBA on Monday when she completely outplayed Brittany Griner in Chicago’s win over Phoenix. The former Delaware star had 22 points, while Griner managed 19 in a losing cause.

It was the first time I really saw Elena Delle Donne give her maximum effort. And she was fantastic.